The chances of spotting coho salmon, steelhead and other fish at the lower end of Strawberry Creek near Orick has increased thanks to the efforts of volunteers.

But after planting thousands of trees to curtail the growth of invasive reed canarygrass, a group of beavers has thrown a monkey wrench into the proceedings, creating a bit of a dilemma.

"About three months ago, they took down a couple hundred to 300 trees in two nights," said Bob Pagliuco, a habitat restoration specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service. "So we banded together to come up with a solution."

Some people wanted to remove or relocate the beavers, Pagliuco said. Others wanted to kill them. But beavers are important to the ecosystem and to coho salmon, Pagliuco said, so they came up with another solution.

About 30 volunteers descended upon Strawberry Creek on Saturday for the AmeriCorps' volunteer day to help fence off the trees, which include willows, alders, spruce and redwoods. The volunteers come from the California Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project, the California Conservation Corps and the non-profit group Pacific Coast Fish, Wildlife and Wetlands Restoration Association.

The volunteers will also apply a latex-sand paint to the trees to try to dissuade the beavers from eating them, said Todd Carlin, a member of the Watershed Stewards Project. Carlin said he and his partner, Matt Bray, helped organize Saturday's restoration project as an individual service project.

"We're trying to keep mindful of the importance of beaver in the ecosystem, especially with coho salmon," Carlin said. "We jumped on (the project) to serve as an example that you don't need a depredation permit; you don't need to relocate the beaver -- they can cohabitate here. We're just trying to see if this will be successful, and then we can apply it to other projects."

Volunteers planted roughly 1,600 trees about a year ago as a way to stop the growth of the reed canarygrass, said Mitch Farro, projects manager for the Pacific Coast Fish, Wildlife and Wetlands Restoration Association.

Canarygrass, which can grow in mats thick enough and strong enough to walk upon, depletes oxygen levels in watersheds, increases flooding and crowds out other plants, Farro said. It has caused problems up and down the West Coast as far away as Alaska, he said. The only way to deal with it is to create shade.

"If you lower the light down enough, it kind of goes away and isn't a problem," Farro said.

The volunteers are currently working on privately-owned ranch land. Farro said the landowner realized that if the canarygrass can be thinned out, it reduces flooding in his field.

"It's a win-win," he said.

But then the beavers began causing a problem. Pagliuco said even though the beavers have destroyed the trees either for food or to build a dam, they're very important.

"These dams they build back up water and create a pond environment," he said. "What we've been finding in the winter and in summer, these pond environments are extremely productive. There's lots of fish growing in beaver ponds, and they're found to grow significantly faster than the fish growing higher up in the tributaries."

Farro said the beavers have also created a problem with trees on a ranch near the Smith River. Volunteers planted trees there a few years earlier, and the beavers moved in there and completely destroyed them.

Once the trees near Strawberry Creek get big enough, the fences will come down, and the latex paint will be taken off, Farro said.

"There will be enough trees that if the beavers take a few, it's no big deal," he said.